In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Earth and Climate Change
peon
Member Posts: 2,644 ✭✭✭✭✭
C&P:
Earth is Hotter Than It Has Been in Thousands of Years.
WASHINGTON - Mother Earth is beginning to resemble a Peggy Lee song - "fever in the morning, fever all through the night."
The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.
The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.
The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water.
Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather.
"This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," Hansen said in a statement.
Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.
Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor.
The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius - 1.8 degree Fahrenheit - of the maximum temperature of the past million years.
"If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today," Hansen said.
Earth is Hotter Than It Has Been in Thousands of Years.
WASHINGTON - Mother Earth is beginning to resemble a Peggy Lee song - "fever in the morning, fever all through the night."
The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.
The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.
The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water.
Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather.
"This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," Hansen said in a statement.
Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.
Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor.
The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius - 1.8 degree Fahrenheit - of the maximum temperature of the past million years.
"If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today," Hansen said.
Comments
Keep the following in mind: the hole in the Antarctic ozone layer was blamed on CFCs. The nations which produced most of the world's CFCs (US, Western Europe and the USSR) are in the Northern Hemisphere. I swear that I read somewhere that the atmosphere does not intermix between hemispheres. So the hole must have been due to natural emissions, volcanoes maybe???
I have a perfectly equitable solutoion which will please both the right and left. We build a big honkin' wall around teh mid east, then we build a big honkin' pipeline to fill it with water. We eliminate the rising water from melting glaciers and eliminate our terror problem [;)]
One volcano can emit more greenhouse gases than all of mankind in one year. I remember at one time the 'experts' said it would take 200 years for Lake Erie to come back from the dead. Experts my *! Dave
The earth goes through these changes all the time. I'm sure that we as the type of people have made it move a little faster, but the earth will keep on cycleing as it has done for millions of years!
And chances are we as humans will kill ourselves off long before the earth will ever kill us!
# 1 - The earth has been warming and cooling long before humans. There is no scientific proof that humans are responsible for the current warming trend.
# 2 - If humans are responsible then what practical and effective measure can we take ? Science has not proven that humans can slow or reverse the warming.
# 3 - If global warming is as catastrophic as environmentalists claim, then are those same people ready to abandon their cars, airplanes, ambulances, and every product that is made from a process that produces green house gases ?
# 4 - Most environmentalists believe it is YOUR lifestyle that damages the environment, not theirs. Its YOUR car that pollutes, not theirs.
# 5 - Robert F Kennedy believes that all environmental damage is caused by Bush and the republicans. He critizes them for driving SUV's and excessive lifestyle. He despises the oil companies and the pollution they cause. He was asked why he flew a private, corporate jet to the interview, he said "because it was going there anyway"